RESOLUTION PROCLAIMING CHICAGO TO BE A TORTURE FREE ZONE
Written comments of
Dr. Mary Fabri, Senior Director of Torture Treatment Services and International Training
Heartland Alliance Marjorie Kovler Center
1331 West Albion Avenue, Chicago, IL
January 12, 2012
I am humbly submitting my written comments for the City Council hearing on the proposed
resolution proclaiming Chicago to become a torture free zone. I am unable to be present in
person due to international work in Rwanda. I have been involved with the Heartland Alliance
Marjorie Kovler Center (Kovler) since its inception in 1987 as a community-based torture
rehabilitation program. As a clinical psychologist, I have had the opportunity to work with
many survivors who have made courageous efforts to heal from the emotional wounds of
torture with the much needed support from a specialized program, such as the Kovler Center. I
am going to “speak” from this reference point.
I have come to firmly believe that no matter where torture is committed – in interrogation
rooms in a Chicago police station; in a prison in Iraq; or clandestine detention centers in
Guatemala or Uganda – torture is wrong. Torture undermines the authority of official agents
and results in a betrayal of authority to the victim, his or her family and their community. The
consequences of torture do not stop with the cessation of the inflicted physical pain or the
manipulative psychological strategies. The consequences of torture last a life time for the
victim and permeate across generations. A Congolese torture survivor that I worked with once
pulled up his pant legs to his knees and showed me scars from stakes that were hammered
through his calves, and said to me, “Mary, these scars have healed.” He then placed his head in
his hands and tearfully said, “But my mind, I do not think it will ever heal.”
The torture experience alters the survivor’s sense of self and identity and thus family
relationships are also altered. To quote Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun tortured in
Guatemala, who wrote in the chapter on “The Survivor’s Perspective” in The Mental Health
Consequences of Torture (2001):
“Emerging from the situation in which we were tortured, survivors often feel, and are,
misunderstood. People expect us to be who we were before the torture occurred. But an
individual changes dramatically. The consequences of torture are multi-dimensional and
interconnected; no part of the survivor’s life is untouched.”
Thus torture impacts the individual victim who then interacts within the systems of their family,
community, and larger society. Families may suffer silently with communication being broken
down by the altered personality of the survivor. Fear of being tortured again or of someone
else being tortured can strangle any sense of freedom and integrity that a family may have
enjoyed. The impact does not stop here, as the family exists in a community and just as the
family system adjusts to the torture survivor, the community system also makes adjustments to
the family. The community may be fearful and ostracize the family due to fear of association.
Fear creates silence, so communities are silenced, demonstrating the proverb of the three wise
monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” a community that is unable to
acknowledge what has happened to one of their members.
At a societal level, torture erodes our moral fiber. Toleration of or feigned ignorance of torture
denies that torture is morally wrong and makes us culpable. This may not seem apparent to
the general population, but with 25 years of serving torture survivors and their families, I can
attest to not only to the prevalence of cruel and inhumane treatment that constitutes torture
that is globally used, but to the years of suffering that follows – the unwitnessed years of
nightmares, the unnoticed isolation, and depression.
This resolution provides us with an important opportunity to take a stand and
acknowledge the use of torture exists in our city and occurs in epidemic proportion globally and
to declare that the Mayor and the City Council of Chicago will stand firm against all forms of
torture and inhuman treatment and will not tolerate impunity making Chicago a torture free
zone.